Why do you read comics? What draws you to the medium? What do you get out of comics that you can't out of a novel or movie? How would you explain comics, and their value to someone who had never seen one or read one?

Because I've always read them? I don't ever remember NOT being able to read (when I was three years old, I somewhat smugly announced to my mom that I could read and then proceeded to demonstrate that I wasn't lying.)

I think comics can do things that fiction and film can't - rather than go the Dickens route and describe a room in detail, down to the brocade on the curtains, comics can just show it. The reader gets to decide how long they wish to look at it, unlike film. Time compression is different, the rhythms of storytelling are different. Plus, budget - you can destroy a planet in one panel and restore it in the next.

As for Comics Evangelism, as I like to call it, it's sometimes just a matter of showing someone something that would appeal to them in another medium - you like spy stories? Read this, it's awesome. You like romance? Uh, hang on a sec, I think I can find something. I think it's also battling the wide-spread-but-slowly-disappearing idea that Comics Are For Kids. Obviously, anything with boobies or graphic violence are an "easy" (read:stupid) way to convey this - "Whoa! Look, she's naked! This must be fer adults!" - but I think enough people saw Watchmen and were interested in reading the book after seeing it. (They probably enjoyed it more than the movie.)

Comics are a format, not a genre. Once you get that across, people seem to understand them a bit more.

I read to enjoy them and enjoy them because they do something that other mediums don't do. That is have less interference (in my opinion) from creator to consumer. The idea, the story gets less watered/dumbed down for the public. And it's a medium that is comparatively less censored that other mediums such as TV and film. That means that new, interesting ideas and ways of storytelling get to the reader.

I also read them to study them and the field is really becoming something special. Again, lot of interesting ideas in interpretation of comics, superheroes, and the genres the comic format employs.